A 60 000-year track record on ecology
Interview with Clayton Thomas-Muller, founder of Defenders of the Land in Canada.
Michael Welch (MW): Clayton Thomas-Muller, you’re on staff with the Indigenous Environment Network and a founder of Defenders of the Land. What distinguishes them from other indigenous organisations?
Clayton Thomas-Muller (CTM): Defenders of the Land is a new initiative. It was created to provide a forum for the most radical land-based First Nations struggles here in this country. For the last three years we’ve been convening an annual gathering, setting up a governance structure comprised of members of frontline First Nations communities that have been engaged directly with the state over land disputes, asserting treaty rights, aboriginal rights, over asserting land claims. The goal has been to develop a grassroots-led base-building strategy with our native people to really invigorate a young generation, to connect them with some veterans of the movement, to make some serious moves forward, and to provide an alternative to the current PTOs (Provincial and Territorial aboriginal Organisations). Many of these organisations have become co-opted because of their arm’s length relationship with the federal government in the context of funding. Many people feel that they have become unable to address some of the most critical issues that we’re facing.
The Indigenous Environmental Network, where I work as Tar Sands campaigner, has been around for about 20 years. It is an environmental justice network in the United States and more recently in Canada. In recent years, we’ve taken our work all across the planet supporting indigenous communities to protect the sacredness of Mother Earth from toxic contamination and corporate exploitation. We do this through grassroots-led strategies around base building. We engage in civil disobedience. We work with tribes, fighting against the fossil fuel regime, the false solutions that are being put on the table by the US government and the Canadian government to try and address climate change, and fighting for climate and energy justice for our people.
MW: Talk about the Tar Sands campaign in particular, about what they’ve been doing to frustrate tar sands development.
CTM: The Tar Sands campaign is part of our Native Energy and Climate Program. [Tar Sands are a type of unconventional petroleum deposits used for oil. Its extraction and production is extremely controversial, causing mass displacements and with huge impacts on the environment. The tar sands mining project in Canada is possibly the largest industrial project in human history and critics claim it could also be the most destructive.] I’m one of five staffers spread out across the continent supporting frontline communities fighting against Big Oil. We started about four and a half years ago when we understood the immense impacts that downstream communities are facing as a result of living so near the world’s largest construction project. We’ve been initiating action camps, trainings, lobby trips, bringing community voices all the way up to the halls of the United Nations and the international climate negotiations to exert pressure on the Canadian government over its energy policy and the human rights impacts that that policy has had on local communities in terms of loss of food security, loss of access to traditional hunting and fishing grounds, and the cancer clusters that so many communities in northern Alberta are now having.
Whose endgame?
MW: Could you discuss the issue of indigenous peoples forming those alliances with urban-based environmentalists who want solidarity with the indigenous peoples? What are the challenges with these sorts of alliances?
CTM: One of the challenges is that different conservation groups and different mainstream NGOs have different cultures of organising. In many instances, a lot of these groups haven’t taken the time to truly understand what it means to work with the unique political and legal status that First Nations peoples have. They’re just trying to get the next big story, or stop a particular policy, but it’s not necessarily with an endgame of having First Nations peoples controlling their lands. You have conflicting intense strategies and that’s what’s playing out in the tar sands as well. There are different groups with different agendas and everybody wants to say they work with First Nations, but not everybody understands what the endgame is for First Nations peoples.
MW: What is the endgame for indigenous peoples?
CTM: The endgame for indigenous peoples is that we don’t want to have to choose between our way of life and being able to get paid in this cash economy. Over half of First Nations peoples live in urban centres, and it’s not because cities provide such great opportunities, it’s because so many of our communities have been devastated by mega-development, whether it’s the tar sands, or hydro, or other forms of development like clear-cut logging. This has severely impeded our ability to continue to practice sustainable economies like we’ve done for thousands of years. I’ve heard from First Nations that they want the tar sands projects to stop: they want to be able to continue to hunt, fish and trap.
MW: At the same time, people, not unreasonably, want to be able to make a good living. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the pushback, which you pointed to earlier. People who want to expand the tar sands, I’m sure, try to flash the dollars in front of indigenous people to say that this is best for their people. “Here’s a way of creating jobs and so forth.” How do those sorts of potential schisms get dealt with?
CTM: They’re difficult to deal with. I don’t stand on podiums and say that all native people are against the tar sands or mega-development in general. You know, people gotta eat. People gotta put food on the table for their kids. And so they’re presented with hard choices. For us it’s about the system that is being pushed by this government, formerly minority, to elevate tar sands as the primary backbone of the Canadian economy. In a time of climate change, in a time when science has proven climate change is caused by man-made CO2, here we have our government doing everything it can to stall a post-Kyoto climate treaty, doing everything it can to market dirty oil sands fuel to Europe, to the United States, to Asian markets, and to really stifle the voice of local communities who are dying as a result of this policy. For us, it’s about working with our people to identify alternative economic solutions while addressing the real crisis that’s happening right now in terms of the human health impacts and ecological impacts that the tar sands has.
A 60 000-year track record on ecology
MW: You pointed out that we do need to change our whole system, and we need to wean ourselves off of carbon-based fuels and carbon-based energies, but in the mean time, people have to eat, they have to get gas in their cars …
CTM: If you look at Canada and the immense work ahead to change our infrastructure to be zero-carbon, the economic stimulus and the job-creation potential is incredible. The amount of workers it takes to maintain sun-farms or wind-farms, versus the amount of workers it takes to maintain a pipeline, is about 12:1. The green economy, as a transitionary economy to something even better and more sustainable down the road, is the way out. It presents us with incredible opportunities for each citizen to have decent work, in unison with the sacred circle of life, to design our local communities’ sustainable economies in a biological, bio-regional way.
MW: I want to ask about the role, historically, of indigenous peoples in these environmental movements and how far back they go. Could you point out what it is about the indigenous component in particular that may be key to an ultimate victory in this struggle?
CTM: We are the key. I don’t want to come off un-humble or anything, but indigenous peoples have a 60 000-year track record on ecology. We know how to take care of this land. We understand our sacred relationship with our plant and animal relatives. Green jobs? Sh*t, we had green jobs for millennia. Eventually, the mainstream environmental organisations are going to understand that. We will continue as First Nations and aboriginal people to acquire more precedent-setting legal victories in the courts of Canada, asserting our rights, and big NGOs, conservation groups, industry, government, will have to accept it. They’d better get with the programme and understand that yes, technology and Western solutions play a key role in addressing the complex global issues we face today, like climate change, like the end of cheap energy, like the loss of natural capital to sustain this economic paradigm we live in called capitalism, but it’s only Western solutions coupled with indigenous traditional ecological knowledge that can give us the future we all deserve. Until people deal with their race, class, and all these different dysfunctions that keep our movement fractured, they’re going to get left in the dust. And a lot of people are starting to understand – as we’re seeing in North America and globally. There is a global fight against austerity measures, because the banks have all ripped us off … and climate change will be one of the catalyst issues within that social movement to drive a popular uprising. We will see indigenous peoples play a key role for the economic paradigm and vision of the future, one that will allow us once again as human beings to understand our role in the sacred circle of life.
